With the development of the computer vision technology, the applications of image-based text detection and text recognition technologies have been increased. For example, the text detection and the text recognition have many practical applications in the aspects, such as document processing, geographical location reading, and image retrieval.
In the field of optical character recognition (OCR), generally, the character box is defined as a rectangular detection box, and characters in a straight line are connected. However, there are a lot of irregular, e.g., distorted, or deformed character combinations in the actually acquired data. For example, the characters in the image are distorted due to the image distortion or shooting angle, or some deformed characters may be used in some designs of the trademarks, badges, or the like.
The existing text detection methods require that the basic connected components in the image are in a straight line, or require pixel-level annotation accuracy, which are not suitable for being widely applied in various scenarios.